Part IThe Story
The Only Reasonable Conclusion
The young man opened his laptop, clicked a bookmark, and asked the computers a question.
The room was in Menlo Park, at the offices of Andreessen Horowitz, and the people in it were not easily impressed. Steven Sinofsky had spent twenty-three years at Microsoft, from 1989 to 2012, rising to president of the Windows division, and he had probably seen more enterprise software demonstrations than anyone alive. Several of his colleagues had built Opsware, a company whose whole business was managing fleets of servers. Sinofsky later called them "an informed, and perhaps tough, audience," which is the kind of thing you write when you want the reader to know that the tough audience was about to be humbled.
On the screen was a web page with a single field at the top, a blank white box of the kind that sits above a search engine. Sinofsky called it "a single edit control." The visitor typed into it in something close to plain English: show computers where CPU > 75%. Then: show computers with a process named WINWORD.EXE. Within seconds a list of machines scrolled down the page, tidy as a spreadsheet, as though the answer had been sitting in a report all along and someone had only now opened the file.
The people in the room had spent their careers on this exact problem. They knew how long it took to ask ten thousand or a hundred thousand corporate machines anything at all. The answer was hours, sometimes days. So they drew the conclusion that experience required.
— Steven Sinofsky, Andreessen Horowitz, June 22, 2014At this point we reached the only reasonable conclusion: Orion was showing us a simulation of the product they hoped to build.
It was not a simulation. It was Tanium, the product of seven years of nearly silent work in Berkeley, and in May 2014 Andreessen Horowitz put $90 million into it. That was the company's first outside money of any kind. Ten months later the firm added $52 million more, and by 2015 Fortune was reporting that Tanium was the largest single investment in the firm's history.
Two details from Sinofsky's account are worth holding onto, because the rest of this story will keep circling back to them.
The first is the benchmark. When the investors reasoned that the demo had to be fake, they were measuring it against the best product they knew. Sinofsky named that product: BigFix, the systems management company that IBM had bought four years earlier for $400 million. BigFix was "the state of the art," in his phrase. BigFix had also been founded and run by the same family. So the experts doubted Tanium on the strength of the Hindawis' own previous record. The father's earlier company was the evidence against the father's new one.
The second detail is a name that does not appear. Sinofsky's account of that first meeting mentions only one Hindawi, the thirty-something son, Orion. His father, David, was the co-founder and then the chief executive. He was sixty-nine or seventy years old and held a Ph.D. in operations research. He had been born in Baghdad, raised in Israel, and had become a Californian by way of the Technion and Berkeley. As far as the record shows, he was not in the room. His work arrived without him. The question went out from the screen, the answer came back, and the man who had spent forty years thinking about how messages cross networks was somewhere else.
That absence, which is partly modesty, partly design, and partly the plain fact that sons outlive the rooms their fathers built, is the clearest thing we know about David Hindawi.
By the Numbers
Baghdad to Kirkland
1951Year the Hindawi family left Baghdad for Israel, one of roughly 123,000 Iraqi Jews to arrive in 1950–51
$400MIBM's price for BigFix, the father-son company founded in 1997
5 yearsTime Tanium was built without outside funding before reaching the market in 2012
10,000×Speed improvement over the state of the art the Tanium team set as its threshold
$142MAndreessen Horowitz's total investment across 2014–15
$9BTanium's valuation in the June 2020 round that included Salesforce
1.5M+Endpoints on a single Department of Defense network managed by Tanium, per Orion Hindawi in 2017
A Name That Belongs to Everyone
Look up "Hindawi" in an English-language encyclopedia and you won't find a person first. You'll find a language. Hindawi, or Hindavi, is an old name for Hindustani: the speech of the Hindi belt, the language of Hind. It means something like of India. It is a demonym, a word for where someone came from, and it has been worn down by centuries of travel into a surname carried by people who have never lived anywhere near India.
The disambiguation page lists them in a column that reads like a short history of the modern Middle East.
Khairi Al-Hindawi was born in 1885 in a village in Diyala province to an Arab father and a Turkish mother. By family tradition, the name came from a great-grandfather who had studied under an Indian scholar called Ghulam Rasool Punjapi. Khairi was a poet who became a provincial governor. He was drafted into the Ottoman army, imprisoned, and nearly drowned in a river by his own side, and he escaped in the confusion as the British closed on Baghdad in 1917. He spent thirty-one years and seven months in Iraqi civil service, worked closely with King Faisal I, and retired on January 1, 1950, a few weeks before the Iraqi government began letting its Jews leave.
Hussain Hindawi was born on July 1, 1947, in Al-Hindiya, in the old Babylonian heartland. He was a journalist who opposed Saddam Hussein, was beaten at a protest in Baghdad's Freedom Square, and fled on foot through Kurdistan into Syria, then to France. There he spent decades in exile and earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Poitiers; his books include Hegel et l'Islam. In 2004 he came back to Iraq to chair its first Independent High Electoral Commission, the body that organized the country's first multi-party elections in half a century. The Times of London called him "the man who built the elections out of nothing." On November 14, 2004, he told Reuters: "All the Iraqi people want the elections."
Ahmed Hindawi founded a scientific publishing company in Cairo in 1997. We will come back to him.
Nezar Hindawi, a Jordanian, was born in 1954. On the morning of April 17, 1986, at Heathrow Airport, Israeli security guards working for El Al found 1.5 kilograms of Semtex in the bag of Anne-Marie Murphy. She was an Irish chambermaid from the Park Lane Hilton, five months pregnant, about to board a flight to Tel Aviv with 375 other passengers. She said her fiancé had packed the bag and that she was flying ahead to meet his parents before their wedding. The fiancé was Nezar Hindawi. The trigger for the bomb was hidden in an ordinary calculator, which still worked as a calculator. He was sentenced to forty-five years, at the time the longest fixed sentence in British history. The Lord Chief Justice, refusing his appeal, called it "about as foul and as horrible a crime as could possibly be imagined."
In April 1986, David Hindawi was forty-one. He had been in America for sixteen years and had founded a telecommunications software company in Berkeley two years earlier. He was an Iraqi-born Jew, raised in Israel, and for several weeks that spring the most famous person with his surname in the Western press was a man who had tried to blow up a plane full of people flying to Tel Aviv.
I have found no record of what David Hindawi thought about this, or whether he thought about it at all. Nothing in any available source connects the two men beyond the alphabet. I mention it only because the coincidence is so exact, and because the device at the center of it, a working calculator that was also a detonator, describes almost perfectly the problem the Hindawi with the Ph.D. would spend the next forty years trying to solve. A computer on a corporate network does what it appears to do, and it may also be doing something else. The whole job is finding out which.
The name keeps turning up. On his English Wikipedia page, David Hindawi's name also appears in Arabic script: ديفيد هنداوي. In 2023 a LinkedIn account belonging to a different David Hindawi, in Sweden, advertised a breakfast seminar on artificial intelligence in Malmö. "Wake-up!" it was called. The encyclopedia's category tags place the Berkeley billionaire among "Iraqi people of Indian descent" and "Israeli people of Indian-Jewish descent." The sources do not explain this lineage, and I can't confirm it. I can only point out that it sits there in the metadata like a stamp in an old passport, and that the word for India has followed this family through Baghdad and Israel to California without ever being explained.
Babylon, Airlifted
He was born on December 8, 1944, into a community that had been in Mesopotamia since the Babylonian exile. The Al-Yahudu tablets, cuneiform records of Judean exiles, date from the sixth century BCE. That was not a minority clinging to the edge of a city. When the British took Baghdad in March 1917, the last Ottoman yearbook for the province counted 80,000 Jews among 202,000 residents. They were the largest single group in the capital. In 1923 the first finance minister of the new Iraqi kingdom was a Jew, Sir Sassoon Eskell. The Jews of Baghdad had been the city's middlemen for generations, trading currency, gold, and silver, and connecting Basra with Bombay and the markets of Europe. Many were educated at the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and were fluent in French and English. They had about the best preparation the Middle East offered for a world run by documents and trade.
David Hindawi was born three and a half years after that world began to end.
In June 1941, after the collapse of a pro-Axis coup, the Jews of Baghdad went through two days of looting and killing that Iraqis called the Farhud. Between 160 and 180 Jews died. The years after brought job quotas, purges, and newspapers that described Jewish merchants as secret bankers for Zionism. In 1948 crowds in the streets chanted "Death to the Jews." Jews were tried in military courts for receiving letters from relatives in Palestine. In March 1950 the government passed a law that looked like mercy and worked like a trap: Jews could leave if they gave up their citizenship. More than 30,000 registered within days. Registering meant they had to be gone within fifteen days. Those who couldn't get out in time became stateless and slept in the streets of Baghdad, and the government said it was prepared to put them in camps. In 1951 it froze the property of everyone who had left or was preparing to leave.
The airlift began under the code name Operation Ali Baba. Someone with a better sense of history renamed it for Ezra and Nehemiah, the prophets who had led the Babylonian Jews home, and between 1950 and 1952 somewhere between 120,000 and 130,000 Iraqi Jews were flown to Israel. When it was over, about 6,000 remained of a community that had been there twenty-five centuries. The Hindawis left in 1951. David was six.
The sources don't say how the family traveled, what they carried, or where they lived when they arrived. I want to be clear about that, because the general story of what happened next is well documented and it would be easy to assume this particular family's story matches it. Many arriving Iraqi Jews were sent to ma'abarot, transit camps of tents and huts. They were meant to be temporary, and some people stayed up to seven years. In the camps, polio infected 30 to 40 percent of Iraqi Jewish children. Families who had owned houses on the Tigris went through garbage for food. Arabic, the language most of them had spoken at home, was now considered the enemy's language. To advance in the new country they had to speak Hebrew, and the institutions run by European Jews tended to treat them as less educated than they were. Whether a six-year-old David Hindawi lived in a tent, in a relative's apartment, or somewhere better, the record doesn't say. What the record does show is where he went from there: the Technion, Israel's institute of technology in Haifa, for a bachelor's and a master's in industrial and management engineering.
He had a contemporary whose life is a useful comparison. Avi Shlaim was born in Baghdad in 1945, a year after Hindawi, into a wealthy Iraqi Jewish family, and left for Israel in 1951, the same year. He later moved to Britain to study and became a scholar of the Arab-Israeli conflict, one of the "New Historians" who used declassified documents in the 1980s to reexamine how Israel was founded. In 2023 he published a memoir, Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab Jew. Two boys, one year apart in age, left the same city on the same airlift. One spent his life looking back, working out from archives what had been done to him and by whom. The other spent his life on systems that tell you what is happening right now.
The Iraqi Jewish writers who came to Israel faced a choice that sounds literary but was really practical. Samir Naqqash, born in Baghdad in 1938, kept writing almost entirely in Arabic, for a shrinking readership, about a childhood that no longer existed. Shimon Ballas, born in 1930 and educated at the Alliance school, switched to Hebrew and wrote novels like Tel Aviv Mizrah about the effort of becoming someone new. You could keep the old language and lose your audience, or adopt the new one and lose something harder to name.
Hindawi chose a third language that belonged to nobody. After college he served in the Israeli Air Force's Operations Research department. Operations research is the mathematics of making systems work: routing, queuing, allocating scarce resources under pressure, and making decisions when information is incomplete and late. It doesn't care what language you dreamed in. It cares how long the message takes to arrive and whether the answer is correct when it does.
In 1970 he left for the United States. In 1977 Mizrahi voters, the children of the camps, broke Labor's hold on Israeli politics and elected Likud for the first time, in what was partly a protest against how they had been treated. By then David Hindawi had been in Berkeley for seven years.
The Mathematics of Waiting
The Berkeley Ph.D. is in operations research, the subject he had practiced in uniform, and the record of his first fourteen years in California is thin. The sources contain no dissertation title, no advisor, no first job. One website describes him teaching at Berkeley and earning an MIT engineering degree in the early 1960s, but this contradicts his own company's biography, which places his undergraduate and master's work at the Technion, and I have left it out. The life we can document starts again in 1984, when he was thirty-nine and founded a company called Software Ventures.
It made telecommunications software. His son, born in Berkeley in 1980, later summed it up in a sentence that is part tribute and part elegy: "His company wrote some of the first software that managed modems — not many people know what those even are any more."
A modem was the point where a personal computer, then a beige box on a desk with no connection to anything, reached out over a phone line and found another machine. It turned data into sound and sound back into data, through a wire that had been built for human voices. Software Ventures wrote the programs that made that connection work. Hindawi's whole first career, in Sinofsky's later summary, "focused on getting PCs connected to the 'net' and keeping them running smoothly."
There's a pattern here worth noticing. A man whose childhood ended when his family was cut off from its city, its property, and its citizenship built his first business on making sure isolated machines could reach each other.
Orion grew up inside that business. "At age 3, I was allowed to play with brand new computers," he wrote in 2015, "which at the time should have been kept far away from my destructive little hands. Rumor has it I loved destroying technology before I loved using it." His elementary school science teachers in the 1980s used computers to teach physics, and he used the math libraries "when most kids had no access to a computer at all." He was a first-generation American, born ten years after his father arrived, and the house he grew up in treated expensive machines as toys and toys as instruments.
Orion offered a contrast from his childhood that explains more about David Hindawi than most of the company press releases. When he went to friends' houses in the evening, their parents came home from work frustrated because "their boss didn't let them do something, or the organizational structure resisted change." His own father came home frustrated too, but differently.
— Orion Hindawi, on his father, to Entrepreneur (2015)It was never over someone stopping him internally, but about "I want to push against the boundaries of the world."
The boy who heard that wanted the same thing. "That appealed to me," he said.
Software Ventures was sold in 1995 to an internet service provider. That was the year the commercial internet started making the modem obsolete, and it was a good year to sell a modem company. Hindawi was fifty. Two years later he started again.
A School With One Teacher
BigFix was founded in 1997. The sources disagree slightly about how old the son was when he started. Sinofsky describes Orion as a Berkeley undergraduate when father and son "teamed up." Orion's own account, given to Entrepreneur, has him in high school, coming by the office after class to write scripts. The second version fits a boy born in 1980 who would have been seventeen that year, and it's the better story anyway: a teenager with a backpack, sitting in his father's office in the afternoons.
At first BigFix was a consumer product. It was meant to keep ordinary people's PCs patched and healthy, which put it in the same line as the modem software: keep the machine connected, keep it running. Then the company turned toward large enterprises. Orion was a sophomore at Berkeley by then and was working, he said, "70 to 80 hours a week" rewriting the software for the change. The work was more interesting than his classes, so he stopped going to them.
"There's just no school that teaches this," he said years later. "Today there are incubators…but the only real way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to learn in the trenches. And I had this amazing school I was allowed to go to: my dad and his company. Not many people have that luxury."
Read closely, that sentence says the son dropped out of the university where his father had earned a doctorate in order to study under his father somewhere else. It's a striking choice for a family that had been pushed out of its old life and gotten back in through credentials: the Technion, the Air Force, Berkeley. Two generations earlier, Iraqi Jews had gotten ahead through the French schools of the Alliance. One generation earlier, David Hindawi had gotten ahead through a Ph.D. Now the son decided the father was the institution.
The father accepted the role and was explicit about it. "I told him, 'I'm going to teach you everything I know about development, sales and running a company. I want you to be better than I ever was.'" At twenty-two, Orion was running BigFix's fifteen-person technology department. The company was selling to the big Wall Street firms: Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs. David took his son to the sales meetings in New York, prepared him beforehand on technique and strategy, and went over each meeting with him afterward, point by point.
That's how operations research gets taught. You run the system, look at the output, find the bottleneck, and run it again.
"By the time he was 25-years-old," David said, "I felt comfortable walking into a meeting with Morgan Stanley with 20 engineers, including some of their top IT people, sitting around a table, and have him run the whole meeting."
Look at how that sentence is built. The father still walks into the meeting. He is in the room, at the table, with twenty Morgan Stanley engineers. What has changed is who talks. The handoff isn't the father leaving; it's the father staying quiet. That's also a fair description of how messages move in a well-designed network, and it describes almost exactly what would happen in Menlo Park ten years later, except that by then the father wasn't in the room at all.
BigFix was good, and in the vocabulary of its field it was big. It could talk to every endpoint on a corporate network, meaning every PC, server, and virtual machine. It collected their configurations and pushed out patches, and it routinely handled 100,000 machines at a time, which was remarkable for its era. It also had the problem that every system of its kind had in the 2000s. A basic question to the network, such as which machines are running this version of that software, could take days to answer. In network security, days is a very long time. By the time you know which machines are infected, the list is out of date.
The company's ending is murkier than its beginning. Contrary Research reports that BigFix had a rough time in the tech downturn, that the Hindawis came away wary of venture capital after raising money for it, and that "both David and Orion left BigFix before the acquisition." Tanium's official biography of David says he "led BigFix until its acquisition." These accounts don't fit together, and I can't resolve them from what's available. The facts that aren't in dispute are these: IBM announced it had closed the purchase on July 20, 2010, the price was reported as $400 million, and BigFix became part of IBM's Tivoli software line. And by then the Hindawis had been building something else for three years.
Ten Thousand Times
According to Fortune, it was Orion who pitched the idea to his father in 2007. Tanium was incorporated on July 16 of that year. David was sixty-two, an age when most men with a nine-figure exit coming would be planning to slow down.
The founding idea came from looking hard at their own product's shortcomings. They didn't set out to beat the competition. They set out to beat themselves, and by an enormous margin.
— Orion Hindawi, as quoted by Steven Sinofsky (2014)We recognized that enterprises needed endpoint control that was much faster than they could get with existing tools, and challenged ourselves to leapfrog the state of the art, including BigFix, where basic management queries could take days. We knew that nothing short of a 10,000 times speed improvement over the state of the art at the time would solve the problem.
Ten thousand times is not an improvement; it's a different product. If a query took two days, a 10,000-fold improvement brings it to about seventeen seconds. The company would later sell "15-second visibility" into every endpoint on a network. The arithmetic was done before a line of code existed.
The way they got there was architectural, and it's worth explaining because it is the core of the whole thing. Competitors like Symantec and McAfee worked on what you could call a hub model. A central data center talks directly to each computer, one at a time, and the company has to spend heavily on servers to handle all that traffic. Tanium didn't put the intelligence in the center. Each computer talks to the computer next to it on the local network, which is fast and cheap. A question enters at one point and moves down a line of machines. Each one adds its own answer to what it received and passes the combined result to the next. Only at the end of the chain does a single summary go back to one server. The company patented this approach and called it the "linear chain." A later corporate description says it "turns decentralization and scale into an advantage." In most systems, more machines means slower answers. Here, more machines mostly means a longer chain.
It's hard not to notice what this design rewards. It rewards relaying: neighbor to neighbor, each person passing on what they know plus what they were given, without waiting for permission from the center. That's how diaspora communities move information. It's how a teenager learns a business from his father by sitting in meetings. I'll point out the similarity once and leave it there.
The team was mostly BigFix's original engineers, "all experts with years of experience in large enterprise management," Sinofsky wrote. They worked in Berkeley for close to two years before any customer saw early results, and the Hindawis spent five years in total building the product without outside money before bringing it to market in 2012. A second company, a second set of patents including one titled Fast Detection and Remediation of Unmanaged Assets, the same people, all running on BigFix money. Orion's later description of the team suggests the same confidence that led them to bet on a ten-thousand-fold improvement: "We are lucky to have one of the few engineering teams in enterprise management who are smart and ambitious enough to do that."
Then came the meeting in Menlo Park, the blank box, the query about WINWORD.EXE, the experts deciding they were watching a fake, and the $90 million.
Sinofsky's blog post about the investment, published June 22, 2014, opened with a line that would follow the family for years: "Lightning doesn't often strike twice, but in the case of the father-and-son team of David and Orion Hindawi, founders of Tanium, Inc., that's exactly what has happened." He called the post Tanium Magic. In the trade press the word "magic" stuck to Tanium for the rest of the decade, which is a little ironic for a company whose pitch was that there was no magic involved, just a better way of routing messages, worked out by a man with a Ph.D. in operations research.
When CNBC asked what had won him over, Sinofsky said: "The product is remarkable. The moment they showed it to us was this breakthrough moment."
The Other 1997
In 1997, the year David Hindawi started BigFix in Berkeley, another Hindawi started a company in Cairo.
Ahmed Hindawi and his wife, Nagwa Abdel-Mottaleb, founded Hindawi Publishing Corporation to publish scientific journals. Their first was the International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences, bought from a previous publisher. By 2006 they owned forty-eight journals and employed about 220 people. In February 2007, months before Tanium was incorporated, they made every journal open access, paid for by fees from authors that averaged around $800 per article, well below what Western competitors charged. Between 2009 and 2011 their output went from 2,500 articles a year to 13,000. By 2012 the company's profit margin was about 50 percent, better than Elsevier's. In January 2021 John Wiley & Sons bought it for $298 million.
Then it fell apart. Paper mills, operations that manufacture fake research and sell authorship, had gotten into dozens of the journals, mostly through special issues. In the fall of 2022 Hindawi retracted more than 500 articles. By the end of 2023 the number of retractions in Hindawi journals had passed 7,000, and Wiley said it would stop using the Hindawi name. The Wiley chief executive who had arranged the acquisition stepped down. In 2023 the journals retracted more than 8,000 articles, more than every publisher in the world combined had retracted in any earlier year.
The two companies aren't related, and the only reason to set them next to each other is the name and the year. But side by side they show something. Both were built on scale. Both depended on a large number of endpoints: for one, authors, reviewers, and volunteer editorial boards of thirty to three hundred scholars per journal; for the other, laptops, servers, and virtual machines. Both bet that a lean central operation could coordinate a huge, decentralized network. The Cairo company grew without being able to check, quickly and reliably, what was actually happening at the edges of its own system. When it finally checked, it found that 10 to 13 percent of what it had published showed signs of fraud.
The Berkeley company sold the ability to check. That was the whole product: ask every node a question and get a true answer before the answer goes stale. Twenty-six years after the same founding year, one Hindawi brand was being retired because no one had verified what was moving through its network, and the other was valued in the billions for verifying exactly that.
Great Things Are Not Cuddly
What followed was the fastest stretch of David Hindawi's long career and the most uncomfortable.
At the beginning of 2015 Tanium had 125 employees. By early 2016 it had 340. Sales rose more than 200 percent in a single fiscal year, and in the last quarter of 2015 the company closed more deals than in all of 2014. In September 2015 it raised $120 million, led by TPG, T. Rowe Price, and Institutional Venture Partners, at a valuation Fortune reported as $3.5 billion. That made both Hindawis billionaires on paper. Tanium was selling to half the Fortune 100; its customers included Target, Visa, Amazon, and JPMorgan Chase. It was also cash-flow positive and debt-free, which almost no fast-growing software company could say. Fortune called it "the world's hottest cybersecurity startup." That year Entrepreneur described the leadership, with some fascination, as two people who made every major decision together: David, seventy, chief executive and chairman, and Orion, thirty-five, president and chief technology officer. The magazine said, honestly, that for anyone with a complicated relationship with a parent, this sounded "like an exhausting and unwise exercise."
Orion had a sharp way of talking about his industry, more combative than his father's quiet decade of building. "Instead of figuring out which building in Shanghai a hacker came from," he told Fortune, "figure out how that hacker got data out of your insecure computers." The old tools, he told CNBC, had customers "playing a game of whack-a-mole. You're chasing somebody but you're always three days behind." Three days was also roughly how long a BigFix query had taken. "Our industry at the end of the day needs to be more honest with our customers."
On February 22, 2016, the son became chief executive. He announced it on the company blog in language that sounded like an org chart but described something closer to a family arrangement. "Given our rapid global growth, we now recognize that we need to focus on building a world-class board, which requires that David spend more time on that aspect of leadership than he has in the past," Orion wrote. David became executive chairman. The title changed; the partnership, they insisted, didn't. "From the first day that David and I founded this company, we have shared decision-making equally. That arrangement has proven — and will continue — to be an excellent one for Tanium."
Five weeks later, on March 28, 2016, at four in the afternoon, father and son appeared together at UC Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, in Room 205 of South Hall, for a talk called "Cybersecurity and the Future of Industry: A Case Study of Tanium." The announcement listed David first. The man who had come to Berkeley in 1970 for a doctorate was back on campus as the subject of the case study.
Then, on April 13, 2017, Bloomberg published a story under the headline "Tanium's Family Empire Is in Crisis."
The sources available to me don't include its full text, so I won't describe what I can't verify. Its outline comes through in the coverage that followed. CNBC summarized it as reporting that Orion Hindawi's "brash leadership style has, among other things, led to an exodus of top talent." Business Insider described it as a "scathing exposé" that portrayed Tanium as a stressful place to work and its chief executive as a harsh leader, and referred to "controversial accusations over why he was firing people." In 2015 Tanium had been the family business that worked. In 2017 it was the family business in crisis.
Orion did not apologize. "Great things are not cuddly," he told Business Insider. The work, he said, was a "demanding, stressful thing." He had already explained in public why Tanium wouldn't compete on the usual Silicon Valley perks. In his 2015 blog post, the one honoring his father, he had written that "many people have tried to do this the easy way, which is throwing massages, nap pods and ping pong tables at them, but truly happy people have a mission they care about, and feel important, fulfilled and treated with respect."
That same post listed three pieces of advice the father had given the son over the years. The first was "Right and wrong is more important than what you want." The second was "Never give up." The third was "People are the true assets of great companies, not contracts or incumbency or physical assets or even products, so always take care of your people." Read against the 2017 headlines, the post is uncomfortable. It isn't hypocritical, exactly. It's what happens when a principle that worked in a fifteen-person engineering group is stretched across five hundred people growing at triple digits.
The company's practical response came in May 2017, and it was very much in the family's style. Tanium raised $100 million, but none of it went to the company. Investors would buy $50 million of stock from employees and $50 million from David Hindawi, at a valuation of $3.75 billion. The investors were buying common stock, not preferred, so, as Orion pointed out, the deal didn't change "the founders' ironclad grip on the company." "We want to let employees buy the houses, cars or whatever they've been dreaming about," he said, "and not feel quite as much pressure on the IPO as we otherwise might."
So the seventy-two-year-old founder sold $50 million of his stock at the same moment and at the same price as the people who worked for his son, and the family kept control. Unhappy employees could cash out. The family's control stayed where it was.
That month the company also started bringing in outside executives. Chris Bream, director of product security at Facebook, became chief technology officer, the job Orion had held since the beginning. He joked that Facebook's motto, "move fast and break things," had been updated to "move fast on a stable infrastructure." Fazal Merchant, previously DreamWorks' chief financial officer, joined as COO and CFO. Mark Wayland came in as chief revenue officer in July. Orion kept saying an IPO would happen eventually, and his reason was revealing. "I don't have to go public," he told CNBC. "I get to go public." A company with $300 million in the bank and positive cash flow doesn't need the market. It goes public as a favor to the people who own it, or not at all.
As of this writing it hasn't.
Emeritus
Money kept arriving, and the valuations kept stepping up. TPG Growth invested $175 million on May 3, 2018, at a valuation that the Wall Street Journal reported was nearing $5 billion. One profile reports that by October 2018 the company had raised $800 million at a $6.5 billion valuation. In June 2020 Salesforce invested at $9 billion. Revenue in 2019 was $440.2 million. The company that had once been a handful of BigFix engineers in Berkeley now had about 2,000 employees, an operations center in Emeryville, and headquarters in Kirkland, Washington, across the lake from Seattle, which one billionaire tracker lists as David Hindawi's home. Another tracker still lists him in Berkeley. On this point the record gives two answers.
Merchant became co-CEO in June 2019. Then between 2020 and 2021 he left, along with CFO Jim Jackson, CMO Chris Pick, and others, and, according to Contrary Research, Orion "acknowledged internal leadership challenges and used the moment to reset company culture and strategy." On February 1, 2023, the company announced that Dan Streetman, previously chief executive of TIBCO Software and Allvue Systems, would become CEO. Orion would move to executive chairman. David would become chairman emeritus.
He was seventy-eight. In one press release he went from co-founder and decision-maker to an honorific.
"Founding and leading Tanium as its chief executive officer has been an honor, both personally and professionally," Orion said that day. The release thanked David in the past tense, as such releases do.
The arrangement didn't last. In June 2026 Business Insider reported a leadership shake-up after Tanium lost five senior executives. In July the company raised another $100 million. In August, according to the press release and the trade coverage, Tanium brought its co-founder back as CEO "amid AI upheaval." Streetman had served less than four years. In September the company announced it had joined Anthropic's Project Glasswing, an effort to use frontier AI to find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers do. The son was running the company again. The father was emeritus, eighty-one, and still on the company's website.
The website itself has a small inconsistency worth noting. On Tanium's leadership page, at the top of both the executive team and the board of directors, the entry reads: David Hindawi, Co-founder and Chairman. Click through to his biography and the first sentence says he "serves as the chairman emeritus." The page lists Orion as "Co-founder and CEO," and Orion's biography says he "serves as its executive chairman." These are snapshots from different moments, never reconciled, sitting side by side. It's a small thing, and it's a little funny to find it on the website of a company whose product exists to give an accurate picture of current state in fifteen seconds.
His fortune, by the public estimates, doesn't move. WealthRank, an online billionaire tracker, took 334 daily readings of David Hindawi's net worth beginning October 28, 2025, and reports the result with no apparent sense of humor: Highest recorded $1.0 billion. Lowest recorded $1.0 billion. 100 percent private holdings. Ranked #3,375 among about 3,388 billionaires in the world. Another site converts the same figure into seventeen thousand troy ounces of gold, as though anyone needed to know how much this man would weigh in bullion. For a family that once had its property frozen by the Iraqi state, there's something fitting about wealth that is enormous, illiquid, and stubbornly unchanging, locked inside a company they have never taken public.
The Edit Control
Here is what the record holds of David Hindawi in his own words: two sentences about teaching his son, quoted in Entrepreneur in 2015, and three pieces of advice relayed through that son's blog. There are no memoirs, no podcast tours, no keynote archive. The Hussain Hindawi born in 1947 wrote eleven books. Avi Shlaim, born a year after David, on the same airlift, wrote Three Worlds. David Hindawi wrote patents, which nobody reads for the prose, and software, which people only notice when it fails.
What we have is the pattern. He was a boy flown out of Babylon in 1951 after a law gave his community fifteen days to register and go. He was a young man in the Israeli Air Force studying how systems behave under pressure. He was an immigrant in Berkeley in 1970 who, fourteen years later, wrote software that let isolated machines dial out and find each other. He was a father who told his teenage son he would teach him everything and wanted him to surpass him, and then, at Morgan Stanley, stopped talking so the son could run the meeting. He was a sixty-two-year-old who walked away from what he had built to start over, with a goal of beating his own best work ten thousand times. He was an executive chairman who sold $50 million of stock alongside his son's employees and kept control. He was a chairman emeritus whose title on his own company's website still hasn't caught up.
In every version, he is the one who sets up the chain and then lets the message travel without him.
The product is still a box. However many features the platform now has, and however much the marketing has grown, the center of it is what Sinofsky described in 2014: a single blank field at the top of a screen. Somebody in an operations center, maybe in Emeryville, maybe in Kirkland, maybe at a bank or a Defense Department office, types a plain question into it. Show computers where CPU > 75%. Show computers with a process named WINWORD.EXE. The question goes to the nearest machine, which adds what it knows and passes it to its neighbor, which does the same, down the line through a building and across a continent, every endpoint answering in turn, until the chain is complete and a single answer comes back to the one who asked. Every name accounted for, in about fifteen seconds.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is a set of operating principles taken from about four decades of David Hindawi's work: Software Ventures, BigFix, and Tanium, and the unusually long partnership with his son that ran through the last two. Some of these principles held up; some cost a great deal; at least one is still unresolved. They are meant as tools for founders building systems, especially second companies, family companies, and companies where the architecture and the culture end up being the same decision.
The principles
- 1.Benchmark against your own best work, not the market's.
- 2.Set an order-of-magnitude threshold before you write code.
- 3.Build in the dark until the demo looks like a fake.
- 4.Push intelligence to the edges.
- 5.Teach by debrief, not by syllabus.
- 6.Hand over the title; keep the shared vote.
- 7.Take capital late, and on your terms.
- 8.Sell honesty as a feature.
- 9.Use liquidity as a pressure valve, not an exit.
- 10.Price hardness into the culture, because someone will.
- 11.Treat professional management as a lease, not a sale.
Principle 1
Benchmark against your own best work, not the market's
When Andreessen Horowitz's partners concluded that Tanium's demo had to be a simulation, the product they were comparing it to was BigFix, the Hindawis' own earlier company. That sums up the founding logic of Tanium. The team didn't start by asking where competitors were weak. They started by asking where BigFix was weak, and the answer was that basic management queries could take days.
This is harder than it sounds. A founder coming off a $400 million exit has every reason to defend the old architecture: it's familiar, it made money, and it's tied up with the founder's reputation. Hindawi and his son took the opposite stance. They treated their own best work as the competitor to beat. That's why the ten-thousand-fold target was believable. It wasn't marketing aimed at Symantec. It was an engineering judgment about a system they understood better than anyone.
Second-time founders usually fail one of two ways. They rebuild the first company with more money, or they move into a new field where their knowledge doesn't apply. The Hindawis took the narrow path between those: the same problem, the same team, and a deliberate rejection of the architecture they had built.
Tactic: Write down the three biggest weaknesses of the best thing you've ever built, and make fixing those the founding brief for the next one.
Principle 2
Set an order-of-magnitude threshold before you write code
"Nothing short of a 10,000 times speed improvement over the state of the art at the time would solve the problem." The sentence matters because of when it was said. The number was set before the product existed, as a condition for building it at all. A twofold improvement is a feature. Ten times is a better product. Ten thousand times makes days into seconds, and that changes what people use the tool for.
This is operations research applied to strategy. In that field you define what an acceptable solution is before you optimize, because otherwise you just make small improvements forever. The fifteen-second number Tanium would later market came straight from that arithmetic: two days divided by ten thousand is about seventeen seconds. The target determined the architecture, the architecture determined the product, and the product determined the category. Without the target, they'd have built a faster BigFix.
Tactic: Before committing to a new product, name the specific number below which customer behavior wouldn't change, and refuse to start if your architecture can't plausibly reach it.
Principle 3
Build in the dark until the demo looks like a fake
Tanium spent five years without outside money before it reached the market in 2012, and almost two years before any customer saw early results. When it finally raised money, the first round was $90 million and the second was $52 million, from a firm that had concluded at first that what it was seeing couldn't be real.
The silence was strategic. A company that raises early has to explain itself early, and explaining to investors pushes a product toward what can be explained, which usually means small, legible improvements. A company that waits can show instead of tell. Sinofsky's reaction, "the only reasonable conclusion: Orion was showing us a simulation," is what every founder wants from a pitch meeting, and it can't be produced with slides. It comes from a product that has outgrown what its audience thinks is possible.
This requires capital to burn, which the BigFix money provided. It isn't advice for a first-time founder with nothing in the bank. For founders with resources, though, waiting to demo is underrated, because the gap between what the audience expects and what they see is the pitch.
Tactic: If you can fund yourself, don't pitch until a skeptical expert watching the live product would honestly suspect it was a mockup.
Principle 4
Push intelligence to the edges
The "linear chain" is a technical decision with philosophical consequences. Competitors sent every query through a central data center and paid for huge server capacity to do it. Tanium had each machine talk to its neighbor over the fast local network, add its own data, and pass the combined result along, with only the final summary going to a server. The more endpoints a customer had, the more the design's advantages showed. Scale became an asset instead of a cost.
The underlying idea, that a system can get faster as it grows if the nodes do the work instead of a bottleneck at the center, has applications well beyond endpoint security. Much organizational dysfunction is a hub-and-spoke problem: every decision routed through one executive, every report through one dashboard, every answer delayed by one approver. The Hindawis' architecture is an argument that the center should collect results, not do the work.
⇄
Two Architectures
How Tanium's design differed from incumbents, and what each implied.
| Dimension | Hub-and-spoke incumbents | Tanium's linear chain |
|---|---|---|
| Where queries go | Central server to each endpoint directly | Neighbor to neighbor across the LAN |
| Effect of adding endpoints | More load, more servers Cost | Longer chain, same summary Advantage |
| Typical answer time | Hours to days | Roughly fifteen seconds |
| Capital required | Heavy data-center investment | Light; uses existing local network speed |
Tactic: Find the place in your product or organization where every request waits on a central node, and redesign it so the edges combine their answers before anything reaches the center.
Principle 5
Teach by debrief, not by syllabus
David Hindawi's teaching method, as he and his son both describe it, was simple and intensive. He briefed Orion on "technique and strategy" before each New York sales meeting and went over it with him "point by point" afterward. That's an apprenticeship built on repetition and review, not on lectures. It produced a twenty-two-year-old running a fifteen-person technology department and a twenty-five-year-old leading a meeting with twenty Morgan Stanley engineers while his father sat at the table without talking.
The important part is that the teacher stayed in the room. Mentoring often fails because the mentor either does the work (the student watches and learns little) or leaves (the student does the work and doesn't get feedback). Hindawi stayed present and quiet. Orion's own conclusion, "There's just no school that teaches this," wasn't a rejection of school. It was an acknowledgment that he'd been given a better one, run by a single teacher.
Tactic: For the next person you're developing, sit in on their high-stakes meetings without speaking, and spend more time on the debrief than they spent in the meeting.
In February 2016 the son became CEO and the father became executive chairman. Orion described this as letting David "spend more time" on building the board. Both said nothing about how decisions were made would change: "From the first day that David and I founded this company, we have shared decision-making equally."
The lesson is about separating titles from control. Titles are signals to the market, the board, and recruits. Control is a structural fact, in this case enforced by the founders' "ironclad grip" on ownership, which the 2017 common-stock secondary carefully preserved. Separating the two let the Hindawis adjust what the outside world saw without changing how the company actually ran.
The risk is the same as the benefit. Shared, unchanging control gives outside executives little room, and the turnover that followed (the Bloomberg exodus, the 2020–21 departures, a CEO who lasted less than four years) suggests that people noticed.
Tactic: When you change leadership titles, write down separately who actually decides what, and tell new executives honestly which of those decisions they will and won't own.
Principle 7
Take capital late, and on your terms
Contrary Research traces the Hindawis' "initial skepticism toward venture capital" to their experience raising money for BigFix. Tanium was the result of that lesson. Five years self-funded. The first round only after the product was in market. Cash-flow positive and debt-free in 2016. $300 million in the bank in 2017. And the 2017 round, the company's largest secondary to that point, with no new shares issued for operating funds at all.
That position let Orion say something few founders of $3.75 billion companies can: "I don't have to go public, I get to go public." Capital raised from strength buys optionality. Capital raised from need buys a timeline, usually set by someone else.
$
The Capital Sequence
Each raise followed proof, not promise.
2007
Tanium incorporated July 16; funded internally by the BigFix team.
2012
Product reaches market after five years without outside capital.
2014
Andreessen Horowitz invests $90M, the company's first round.
2015
$52M more from a16z; $120M round led by TPG, T. Rowe Price, and IVP at roughly $3.5B.
2017
$100M secondary at $3.75B: $50M from employees, $50M from David Hindawi; founder control unchanged.
2018
TPG Growth invests $175M as valuation nears $5B.
2020
Salesforce invests at a $9B valuation.
Tactic: Raise your first outside round only when you could plausibly turn it down, and say so in the meeting.
Principle 8
Sell honesty as a feature
Orion's public positioning made a market argument out of an ethical one. "Our industry at the end of the day needs to be more honest with our customers." "Instead of figuring out which building in Shanghai a hacker came from, figure out how that hacker got data out of your insecure computers." After the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017, he pointed out that customers could have prevented it by patching, the unglamorous basic work Tanium emphasized, in contrast with what he called the "really esoteric approaches" competitors offered.
This was positioning, and it was also David Hindawi's advice in practice: "Right and wrong is more important than what you want." In a field that sells fear and attribution, the Hindawis sold hygiene and visibility. That isn't exciting, and it is exactly what the father had been building since Software Ventures: keep the machines connected, keep them running, know what's actually on them.
Tactic: Find the uncomfortable truth your industry avoids telling customers, build your product around addressing it, and say it publicly.
Principle 9
Use liquidity as a pressure valve, not an exit
The May 2017 secondary came a month after the Bloomberg exposé, and it did several things at once. Employees could sell $50 million of stock and, in Orion's words, "buy the houses, cars or whatever they've been dreaming about." The founder sold $50 million alongside them at the same price, which made the deal look fair. Investors bought common shares, which kept the governance unchanged. And it reduced the pressure for an IPO the company didn't need.
The underlying idea is that employee equity in a company that stays private a long time slowly turns into resentment unless some of it can become cash. A well-timed secondary releases that pressure without giving up control. It also has a less flattering function, which this deal performed too: it gives unhappy people a dignified way out.
Tactic: If your company plans to stay private more than five years after a large round, schedule regular secondary windows for employees before frustration builds up.
Principle 10
Price hardness into the culture, because someone will
"Great things are not cuddly." Orion said that in 2017 and meant it. The same blog post that praised his father's "clean model of winning" rejected "massages, nap pods and ping pong tables" in favor of mission, respect, and fulfillment. Then Bloomberg reported a family empire in crisis, an exodus of senior talent, and disputes over firings.
The lesson isn't that intensity is wrong. Tanium's results suggest it worked commercially for a long time. The lesson is that a demanding culture has a cost, and if founders don't account for it on purpose, the press, departing executives, and recruiting will account for it for them. The executive turnover from 2017 through 2026 reads like a running tally of that cost.
⚖
The Ledger of Intensity
What the Hindawi culture bought and what it cost.
| Bought | Cost |
|---|---|
| Sales up 200%+ in one fiscal year Scale | "Family Empire Is in Crisis" headline, April 2017 Risk |
| Cash-flow positive, debt-free while hypergrowing Scale | Reported exodus of top talent Risk |
| All top 10 U.S. banks as customers Scale | Departures of co-CEO, CFO, CMO in 2020–21 Risk |
| Mission-driven recruiting pitch Try | Five senior exits before the 2026 leadership reset Risk |
Tactic: Once a year, estimate what your culture's intensity is costing in departures, recruiting difficulty, and reputation, and decide deliberately whether it's worth paying again.
Principle 11
Treat professional management as a lease, not a sale
Tanium's leadership history follows a recognizable pattern. The founders run it. The founders bring in operators (Bream, Merchant, Wayland) as it scales. A co-CEO structure is tried and abandoned. An outside CEO, Dan Streetman, takes over in 2023 with the founders moved to executive chairman and chairman emeritus. Then in August 2026 the co-founder comes back as CEO, after less than four years, "amid AI upheaval."
When founders keep control, professional management is effectively borrowed. It can be useful, even necessary, but the founders' ownership guarantees they can take the company back. Being honest about that from the start, with yourself, the board, and the executive being hired, is better for everyone than pretending the handoff is permanent. The Hindawis' structure meant every outside leader was running the company on terms the founders could end, and the record suggests they used that option when they decided the moment required it.
◎
Leadership Phases at Tanium
Titles changed; control did not.
| Period | Arrangement | Phase |
|---|---|---|
| 2007–2016 | David CEO, Orion CTO; decisions shared equally | Founders |
| 2016–2019 | Orion CEO, David executive chairman; outside CTO, COO/CFO hired | Transition |
| 2019–2021 | Co-CEO structure with Fazal Merchant; then executive departures | Strain |
| 2023–2026 | Dan Streetman CEO; Orion executive chairman; David chairman emeritus | Lease |
| 2026– | Orion returns as CEO | Recall |
Tactic: When you hire an outside CEO into a founder-controlled company, put the founders' recall rights in writing on the first day, because an arrangement nobody acknowledges hurts everyone involved.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— David Hindawi, recalling what he told his son at BigFix (Entrepreneur, 2015)I'm going to teach you everything I know about development, sales and running a company. I want you to be better than I ever was.
— David Hindawi (Entrepreneur, 2015)By the time he was 25-years-old I felt comfortable walking into a meeting with Morgan Stanley with 20 engineers, including some of their top IT people, sitting around a table, and have him run the whole meeting.
— David Hindawi, as recounted by Orion Hindawi (2015)Right and wrong is more important than what you want.
— Orion Hindawi, announcing his appointment as CEO (February 2016)From the first day that David and I founded this company, we have shared decision-making equally.
— Orion Hindawi, to Business Insider (May 2017)Great things are not cuddly.
Maxims
- Your last success is your next competitor. The product worth building is the one that makes your previous best look obsolete.
- Decide the threshold first. If the improvement you're aiming for won't change how customers behave, it isn't worth starting.
- Stay quiet until the demo looks impossible. A skeptical expert assuming you've faked it is the strongest pitch there is.
- Let the edges do the work. Systems that send everything through the center get slower as they grow; systems that relay neighbor to neighbor don't.
- Teach in the room, then stop talking. The handoff happens when the teacher stays at the table and lets the student lead.
- Titles are signals; control is structure. Change one without the other only if you're willing to say so plainly.
- Raise money you could refuse. Capital raised from strength buys options; capital raised from need buys someone else's timeline.
- Honesty can be the product. In a field that sells fear, selling basic visibility and hygiene is a real advantage.
- Every culture has a cost. If you don't account for it, the people who leave will.
- Know what you're asking, and of whom. Fifteen seconds is only fast if every node answers truthfully.
